New Delhi: According to a new research report, more than 100,000 Android apps available on Google Play are suspicious. Bit9 has released a report summarising an analysis of more than 4,00,000 Android apps available on Google Play.
The report has been prepared after looking at the permissions, categories, publishers, ratings and popularity to rate the overall trustworthiness of each mobile app. The reports states, the majority of Android apps (72 per cent) use at least one permission that gives the app access to private data or control over the smartphone's functionality. But it's not just what permissions an app requests that matter, it's whether those permissions make sense for the nature of the application. For example, it is less suspicious for a social media app to have access to email contacts than it is for a wallpaper app to do the same.
"We took into account information about the publisher, the number of high-risk permissions requested, and the category of the application, and grouped our results into three buckets: green (trustworthy), yellow (low trust, but not malicious) and red (no trust and suspicious). We found that 25 percent, or more than 100,000 apps, fell into the red category." These red apps have access to private information, which represent a risk to enterprises.
The report does not say that 25 per cent of all apps are malicious. It instead means that a large percentage of mobile apps are accessing more information on their devices than people realise, and when those devices are holding both corporate and personal data, this is a problem for individuals and their employers.
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